Some of his wealthy friends had married, and at their evening soirées he met men and women—authors, artists, statesmen, men of progress, men and women whose names the world yet gratefully remembers; and then away he would rush off to the lodgings of other friends—dissipated medical students as they were in those far-off days, types of the Bob Sawyer class, and with gin-and-water would pass the night, unless, as was too frequently the case, they plunged into the debaucheries of London by night, when respectability had gone to bed.
Lower and lower did Wentworth fall, and then came the end. The lady discovered how romantic had been her dream, and the dismissed lover staggered under the blow. It is hard to realise what a moral wreck that pitiable wretch had become—how with no real excuse for his drink and dissipation, now almost a necessity of his life, all hope had vanished from his horizon, all faith in God or man.
For a time he led, as many do, a dual life—decent by day, the reverse by night. London is full of such men now. Fathers and mothers living far away in the quiet country home have no idea what London is by night, or was, for I write of a wild scene of dissipation which no longer exists. A young man in business is sheltered more or less from the lowest abysses of London life. A young man in a decent home is also guarded to a certain extent. It is the stranger within the gates who, as a rule, falls the more easily to the allurements of vice. He is alone; he needs society. It is not good for man to be alone. If a man cannot have good society, the chances are he will have bad.
The Church at one time made no effort to bring back such lost ones. They drew a hard and fast line. They only admitted the hypocrite or the saint. Wentworth belonged to neither class. In reality he had little altered. He left religious society because he could not with an honest conscience conform to its ideas, or speak its language, or adopt its conventionalisms. At one time he believed in it because he had been brought up in it. He had been taught phrases, and he used them without ever thinking of their meaning, and when the meaning did not come he went on using them, believing it would come. ‘Preach faith till you have it,’ said an old divine to a young brother, ‘and then you will preach it because you have it.’ In Wentworth’s case the remedy did not answer. He preached because he thought it his duty. He did not preach because he felt it dishonesty to use terms of doubtful meaning utilized in the pulpit in one sense, understood in the pew in another. He had not found light in Little Bethel or Cave Adullam. Was it to be found elsewhere, in the gaiety and dissipation of the world? Well, that was what he wanted to find out for himself. Like most of us, Wentworth was too impatient, and could not wait for the happy surrounding which comes to all true men soon or late. Religious people and he had parted. It seemed to him as if he could do no good, and as if the attempt to do so were harm. He had aimed high and fallen low. To save himself from starvation he did a little literary work, but that was a poor staff on which to lean. He had, as most of us have, daily wants, and, to meet them, required daily cash.
Turning one night into a tavern, he found two or three seedy-looking men manufacturing what they called ‘flimsy’ for one of the dailies. They took pity on him, and taught him how to do the same. For a time he was their assistant, and they gave him a share of the pay; but evil communications corrupt good manners, and, to drown all thought, he did as they did: sat up late in public-houses—these latter places kept open nearly all night then—and the excitement of the new life came to him as a pleasurable relief from the darkness which had cast a gloom on the morning of his days.
It became in time a habit with him to spend his nights in the music-halls, such as the Cider Cellars and Evans’s, which now have long ceased to exist, where he could forget what he once was, and did not think of what he once hoped to be. At such places all classes met in boon companionship—the lord and the lout, the drunken clergyman, the greenhorn from the country, the man of business, or county magistrate, or attorney up in town for a day or two and anxious to see life, the wild sawbones, who was supposed by his anxious parents far away to be walking the hospitals and fitting himself for a useful career, reporters, students, barristers, reckless men of all kinds, over whom tailors and landlords alike grieved. Then there were haunts still more infamous, frequented by women as reckless and abandoned as the men. Some had seen better days; some had loved, and been betrayed and abandoned; some had never known virtue in any shape; all on their way down to be trodden underfoot.
‘I was gay myself once,’ says many a man of the world, as he hears of the excesses of dissipation. Alas! so much the worse for him. It is true all experience makes a man, in one sense, wiser, if he be a wise man. Yet it is a solemn truth that no tears, no penitence, no prayers, no exertions of an after-life, can restore to the sensualist or the profligate the bloom, the freshness and purity of early youth. None of us can blot out the past. The joyous aspect of innocence and grace can never be recalled, though, for all who seek it, there is a Divine mercy, lasting as eternity, broad as heaven itself.
At one time the idea of being in such company would have been shocking to Wentworth. There are thousands who, however, thus do fall away. But they do so little by little. No one suddenly becomes base, said the Latin moralist, and he is right. A real friend or two might have saved Wentworth many a bitter hour. But at that time the thing was impracticable. The line of demarcation between the Church and the world was too strictly drawn. In the parable of the Great Teacher, the tares and the wheat grew side by side. In its superior wisdom, the Church undertook to pull up and get rid of the tares, but in doing so a good deal of mischief was done. There was no halting between two opinions. You were either converted or not. A man was either the child of God or of the devil. The Church held up an impossible and an unlovely Christianity, into the belief of which men and women were terrified.. To produce that effect there was no end of excitement, and then, when the excitement was over, in too many cases came the inevitable relapse. One result of this was that the victim had to look elsewhere for the excitement which had become part and parcel of his being—to the flowing bowl, to what is called jolly companionship, to the siren voice of worldly pleasure—and the novice falls too easily a prey. Abelard is a more common character than Simeon Stylites. The songs of Circe are pleasant to listen to, and there are roses and raptures for the sinner as well as the saint, and the roses and raptures are now—not in a world to come. The world has a great fascination for a lad brought up in a pious home, to whom it has been represented as a waste howling wilderness, peopled with devils fearful to gaze on. When he steps into it, and finds how unfairly it has been drawn to him by the Church, the chance is that he runs to the other extreme. We have hardly yet emancipated ourselves from the morbid and monkish theology of the Romish Church. There come to the writer sad recollections of a dismal theology to which he was expected to give his assent. Never did men then talk of man being made in the image of his Maker—of his being vicegerent of the earth, only a little lower than the angels, covered with glory and honour. All was devilish man could say or do. In vain was education, or science, or art. The cleverer, the more useful, the more decent you were, the more mischievous, the further from God.
Such was the doctrine preached from a thousand pulpits, at any rate, not many years since. And thus it was that the churches were chiefly filled with ignorant women and old men, or with young people—who died early of consumption—who accepted everything they heard in the pulpit, who knew nothing of the world they denounced, to whom the language of passion and temptation was unknown. It is easy to be religious when all that is irreligious has worked itself out of the man—to lead a dull, decent, formal life, when the capacity for excess is gone, or the spendthrift has been turned into a miser; when old age has taken from woman her power to tempt, and robbed the wine-cup of its fascination; when all a man wants is an easy-chair by a good fire. When we cry with Tennyson:
‘Ruined trunks on withered forks,
Empty scarecrows, I and you.’